Chris Beard

CEO

Chris Beard is the CEO of Mozilla Corporation and a member of the Board of Directors. He is a passionate advocate for open source, and has been leading open source projects in engineering, product and marketing roles for the past 17 years.

While Chris’ first brush with the Mozilla project was in 1998, when he downloaded the Netscape source code on the first day it was released, he didn’t officially become a part of Mozilla until 2004 when he joined the founding team to launch Firefox 1.0.

As Mozilla’s VP of Products from 2004-2007, Chris led marketing and product management to build the brand, global community and core products required to scale Firefox from zero to hundreds of millions of users. From 2007-2010, as Chief Innovation Officer, Chris was responsible for Mozilla Labs, developing new technology and product concepts that formed the foundation for Mozilla’s mobile, social and identity products. He served as Chief Marketing Officer from 2010-2013, overseeing global engagement and strategy for Mozilla’s pivot to mobile with the successful launches of Firefox for Android and Firefox OS at Mobile World Congress.

Chris then joined Greylock Partners as an Executive in Residence in early 2013, until his appointment as Mozilla’s interim CEO in April 2014. He was appointed as Mozilla’s CEO in July 2014.

Prior to Mozilla, Chris served in a variety of senior marketing and product roles at Cluster File Systems (acquired by Sun), HP and Linuxcare. He was also co-founder and CEO of The Puffin Group (acquired by Linuxcare), an early open source technology startup that was focused on Linux kernel and device driver development.

Chris studied economics and biochemistry at the University of Ottawa and received his MBA in International Business from the University of Edinburgh, where he was also awarded the John McFarlane Prize for Leadership. He is a member of the national board of directors of Make-A-Wish.